Graduation Ceremonies are always made up of a lot of memories, bundles of screams and shouts, stacks of words of appreciation and fortitude, many pictures, heavy hearts and drops of silent tears as the graduates move on to the next stage of their life. School and college life are supposed to be the best time of a person's life… and that time for many Scholasticans just officially ended on the 30th and 1st of June and July.

Scholastica celebrated the graduation of its A Level and O level class of 2006 candidates on the on the 30th and 1st of June and July respectively. The programs were held at the STM hall where the students, with red ribbons wrapped around them, were handed over their graduation certificates by Mrs. Yasmeen Murshed, Ms. Wasima Parveen, Ms. Madiha Murshed and Ms. Shabnam Sobhan. There were 99 students graduating from the A' Level batch and over 220 students from the O' Level batch. A cultural presentation titled “Rays of Hope” was performed to inaugurate the ceremony with vibrant songs and dances, as well as recitation of poems.

Other than graduating certificates, awards relating to Debate, Drama, Community Service, Newsletter, Instruments, Perfect Attendance and Outstanding Academic Achievement were also given out and several students grabbed a handful of them. The Valedictory speech followed next, succeeding with a speech from the Secretary General of Scholastica Alumni Association (SAA). The Secretary General of SAA, Mr. Nazim farhan Chowdhury, was apparently a very 'infamous' Scholastican who stole the school bell, during his school life around 20 years back, hid it under Mrs. Yasmeen Murshed's chair and enjoyed a Tiffin break three times the normal time, when the school finally had to give the bell using a borrowed bell from an ice cream man. Even though, 20 years from then, the school is a lot more advanced, if any of you scholasticans are notorious enough, you can give this a try, but be prepared to face whatever happens next!

The final speech was delivered by Mrs. Yasmeen Murshed, which was as usual remarkable, touching every single graduating student and moving many to tears. She talked about the accomplishments of Scholastica, what a school and college means to a student's life, her hopes for the graduates and requested all students who are leaving abroad for higher studies to come back and contribute to a developing Bangladesh, in any way possible.

It is really difficult to bring about such an abrupt end to so many fond memories with the school and college. Nonetheless, Scholastica can proudly say that they have contributed to make a scholastican successful in whatever field he/she chooses. A heart felt congratulations to all the graduating students of Scholastica!

By Adnan M. S. Fakir

Teen Diaries The heat is on

Recap: Welcome to Teen Diaries, a chronicling of the lives of four very different high school girls. Over the past few weeks, we've watched the clique of popular girls Prianka and Lamia break up. Lamia the girly girl immediately paired up with Sadia the new girl, and in a surprise move last week, queen bee Prianka decided to take on the nerd Afrida as her new 'project'. This week, we hear what Sadia has to say about that.

Dear Diary,
The Biology group project Lamia and I had been working on got the same marks as the one submitted by Prianka and Afrida. Now both teams will go head to head with the senior classes to try and secure a place in the upcoming inter-school science fair. Initially, I hadn't had a shred of confidence in our project because Afrida is a one-girl team, with her artwork being as brilliant as…well, the rest of her, but Lamia surprised me. That girl can paint!

If Afrida's DC-style sketches of butterflies on the Galapagos island were awesome, Lamia's water colour rendition of an aquatic habitat were just as breathtaking!

Unfortunately, Lamia's idea of preparing for the next round is to look like winners, and she's been convincing me to get a makeover. Oh dear God, help me! I will kill myself if she turns my hair pink, I swear on Ronaldo's name, I really will.

Although if you put aside her pink-hair ideas, she's actually quite nice. If she could just be that instead of the Barbie-life maniac she tries to be, people would actually respect her.

Even Prianka would be forced to respect her. Oh, I think Prianka's a bit insecure now that Lamia and I have also qualified for the next round. I know she won't admit it, but her tongue lashing at me has crossed all limits recently! Nowadays she clings to Afrida, and I can't help but pity the poor girl…God knows what that raving maniac has up her sleeve for her.

Can you believe it…in all this girl talk I forgot to mention the most important thing! I got selected in the girl's basketball team! Yay! This is probably the best (and the most sane) thing that's happened to me since I joined RS High. I can't wait to start practice. Oh and guess who our captain is? Prianka! Isn't that really strange?

I was shocked out of my wits when I found out she's our captain. I mean, I'm not scared of her or anything, but girls like her and basketball doesn't seem to go, does it?

You'd picture her in debate teams or something, what with all that verbal attack 24/7! Yeah, I know, I'm going to hear a lot, LOT of crap from now on, but this is basketball, and I don't care how good she is at it, I'm not going to give her a chance to complain about my game. No matter what it takes, I'm going to be better than she is.

Bdbuddy.com is what I would like to call a social web. This kind of things started with myspace.com and spread fast all over the world. Bangladesh caught up too! This site is not only a meeting and dating site; it also has feature like galleries, classified a section to upload articles etc. The classified section is pretty interesting; it has space for everything productive- not just a browse through or time pass thing. Here one can upload a CV and watch out for opportunities.

We caught up with the site manufacturer, Moin Kazi, to learn more about this site. Launched in March this year, the site is owned by Moin and his brother Omar. Although currently functioning as social website, there are plans for it to incorporate a magazine, which will ultimately be available in print form.

This site should hold appeal for the desis, and in fact, within the first few months of its inception, it has seen online traffic of more than 600 hits per day.

One interesting feature is that the gallery. Although other similar sites have such galleries, this particular one has covered Bangladesh from head to toe, and includes some fine painting and funny pictures.

Here's what site manufacturer Moin Kazi has to say about the site:

My brother Omar and I are both members of a few online networking communities and we noticed that each site has a few Bangladeshis and Bangladeshi groups. We realized that there are hundreds of thousands young Bangladeshis with internet access but they all are not connected to each other. With that in mind, we started BDbuddy.

Right now the members of BDbuddy can create profile, upload pictures, music and videos, share blog, forum, articles, calendar and chat. We have plans to come up with an e-magazine and link sharing section soon. In future we plan to arrange get-together-parties in different cities so that the BDbuddy members can meet each other in person and broaden their personal network.

There are too many websites for Bangladeshis. Most of these websites do not last for long as they focus on too many things. Some of these websites fail to provide the online goers with information or service they seek. Therefore we spend a lot of time focusing on what our members want. We do our best to provide our members with service and tools they need to network with other Bangladeshis. We try to stick to our main theme: “network for Bangladeshis around the world”.
Lets hope all the best for bdbuddy!